The uncomfortable secret of successful people: Forget work-life balance, you have to be ‘obsessed’, ex-Wall Streeter and business coach says

Business coach and ex-Wall Streeter Codie Sanchez says every single successful person she’s ever met has one thing in common: “They’re obsessed.” 

“That’s it. That’s the secret,” says Sanchez, who has nearly 2 million TikTok followers and has interviewed nearly a dozen billionaires, including Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale. 

While all of the billionaires she’s interviewed on her podcast BigDeal are “wildly different,” she says in a video on her TikTok account that they’re all obsessed with what they do “almost to the point of it being uncomfortable.”

Sanchez actually got her start in journalism, winning the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, before transitioning into finance working for firms such as Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, and State Street. She’s the founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking, a media and finance education company with millions of followers and subscribers, aimed at empowering people to take control of their financial futures through unconventional paths like small business ownership. She also runs venture fund Contrarian Capital, earned her MBA from Georgetown University, and is a New York Times bestselling author. Her estimated net worth is about $17 million.

What obsession means in entrepreneurship

One of the biggest debates in the workforce and entrepreneurship is whether work-life balance can really exist and whether it’s effective. 

Assuming Sanchez’s advice that the most successful entrepreneurs and business people are “obsessed,” that leaves little room to achieve what one might consider traditional work-life balance. It requires being more than just curious, Sanchez says, and obsession can help you beat someone who is richer and smarter than you.

“Obsession means that you’re thinking nonstop until your relentless action makes it unreasonable for you to not win,” she says. “Quantity overwhelms failure. Repetition steers fate.”

There are countless examples of successful entrepreneurs and investors who were obsessed with their work—so much so that they never took a break during years of hard work. 

Billionaire Mark Cuban went seven years without a vacation starting his first business and worked late nights learning new software details until he sold it for $7 million. Today he’s worth more than $9 billion.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, in the early days of his company, staying up until 3 a.m. to fulfill orders. Now he’s the fourth-richest person in the world with a $253 billion net worth. 

And Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was also obsessed with his craft, and was infamous for going into “founder mode.” He was known for “rolling up his sleeves and, true to his word, working more closely with all of us, at every level, to make sure that when we got our next opportunity, we hit it out of the park,” Shalini Govil-Pai wrote in a 2024 op-ed for Fortune. Govil-Pai is vice president and general manager of Android TV at Google and previously worked with Jobs.

And although these entrepreneurs were dedicated to their craft for years, Sanchez says it doesn’t necessarily require a lifetime of dedication to be successful.

“What is shocking to me is what can happen with three-to-five years of absolute dedication,” she says. “If you make that 10 years, that’s where billionaires start to land.”